Aristotle
refers to human slaves as 'animated property'. The phrase exactly
describes the current status of nonhuman animals. Human slavery
therefore presents an enlightening parallel to this situation. We
shall explore this parallel in order to single out a past response
to human slavery that may suggest a suitable way of responding to
present-day animal slavery.

Not long ago
such a parallel would have been considered outrageous. Recently,
however, there has been growing recognition of the claim that a
sound ethic must be free of bias or arbitrary discrimination based
in favour of our own species. This recognition makes possible a
more impartial appraisal of the exploitative practices that mark
our civilisation.

Slavery in
the ancient world has been the subject of a lively debate among
historians. How did it arise? Why did it end? Was there a
characteristic 'slave mode of production'? We do not need to go
into all these disputes. We shall focus instead on the distinctive
element of slavery: the fact that the human being becomes property
in the strict sense of the term. This is sometimes referred to as
'chattel slavery' - a term that stresses the parallel between the
human institution, and the ownership of animals, for the term
'cattle' is derived from 'chattel'. Slave societies are those
societies of which chattel slavery is a major feature. They are
relatively rare in human history. The best known examples existed
in the ancient world, and in North and Central America after
European colonisation.

We shall
focus on slavery in classical Greece and Italy, because there is a
sense in which the perspective of that period is nearer to our
own. In ancient times, the idea that some human beings should be
under the absolute subjection of others was so much taken for
granted that it went virtually unquestioned. In this respect
slavery in the classical period differs from the more recent
institution of slavery in America, which was criticised from the
beginning. True, Aristotle refers to some opponents of slavery,
but they left so slight a trace that it is hard even to identify
them; and the rare critical tones that we find over a span of many
centuries, whether they come from Sophists, Stoics or Cynics, are
either ambiguous or inconsequential.[1]
They are confined to the abstract claim that no one was born a
slave, or to the interpretation of slavery as 'a condition of the
soul'. The actual practice was in fact so widely accepted and so
pervasive that it has been claimed that 'There was no action or
belief or institution in Graeco-Roman antiquity that was not one
way or other affected by the possibility that someone involved
might be a slave.'[2]
There is an evident parallel here with the way in which most
people still take for granted the absolute subjection of animals
by human beings.

What then did
it mean, for a human being, to be a piece of property in classical
Athens or Rome? Obviously much depended on the particular times
and circumstances in which the slave lived, but a few
generalisations can be made. Slaves did not occupy any definite
place in the social scale, nor in the economy. Chattel slaves
could be peasants, miners, tutors, herdsmen, wet-nurses or
artisans. They might live in twos and threes with a small farmer,
or be part of large gangs attached to the estate of a great
landowner. They might also share the urban life of an aristocratic
family in whose service they were. Because of these differences,
there are wide variations in opinion among historians about the
extent to which the lot of the slave was a miserable one. Some
have emphasised the appalling situation of the slaves working in
the Greek silver mines of Laurion, from where no fewer than twenty
thousand escaped during the Peloponnesian war. Equally harsh was
the treatment of the chain-gangs employed to cultivate the huge
farms of Sicily, where during the late second century BC rebellion
was endemic. Other scholars, more prone to defend the reputation
of classical civilisation, point instead to the bonds of affection
that could tie the family slaves to their master, evidence of
which is to be found in a number of funeral inscriptions, and in
the many tales about the loyalty and affection of slaves.

Such
disputes, and the wide range of possibilities that they reveal,
make it difficult to grasp what the situation of the slave really
was. If, however, we look behind the variety of external forms, we
find one stable element: a condition of powerlessness. The
treatment that the slave is accorded depends solely on the master.
As a chattel, slaves have lost control over their own selves. And
at the root of the master's power over the slave is the fact that
the slave is not acknowledged by the community. Slave status is
characterised by what the slave is not: slaves are not free, they
cannot determine how to use their own labour, they cannot own
property, they generally cannot testify in court, or if they can,
it is usually under torture; even their family is not their own,
for although family ties may be recognised in practice, slaves
have no rights as parents and their children belong to their
master. Bought and sold as objects, liable to corporal punishment
and sexual exploitation, they stand outside the protective moral
realm of the classical community.

All this
confirms the parallel we suggested at the outset. As with slaves
in ancient times, so with animals today, treatment varies - from
the affectionate care of the 'pet-owner' to the naked exploitation
of the factory farmer concerned only with maximising profits. The
common thread, again, is that the animals have suffered a total
loss of control over their own lives. The difference in interests
and capacities of human and animal slaves does not affect their
fundamental identity of status. Like chattel slaves, nonhuman
animals stand outside the protective moral realm of the modern
community.

Political
action on behalf of animals today focuses on abolishing practices,
such as the bullfight or the keeping of hens in battery cages; or
on changing forms of treatment - for example, replacing hot-iron
branding with less painful ways of identifying bovines, or using
local anaesthetics when performing mutilating operations such as
castration and tail-docking in pigs, bovines and sheep. A look at
the history of slavery shows that this type of approach had only a
marginal impact. Gladiatorial games were abolished, but this did
not influence the general condition of slaves. Neither was this
condition fundamentally changed by the undoubtedly desirable
regulations that ruled out the most blatant forms of mistreatment,
for example branding on the face or castration.

Slaves did,
however, have one resource that animals do not have: they could
rebel. This might seem to mark an important difference, but it had
little effect. Although the debate on the reasons for the end of
classical slavery is lively and still unresolved, no scholar
regards slave rebellions as a significant factor in ending
slavery.[3]
The explanations offered vary, and may give prominence to
economic, political, religious or sociological causes, but as far
as slave rebellions are concerned, the thousands of crosses that
bordered the road from Capua to Rome after the defeat of Spartacus
still serve as a symbol of the normal outcome of these events. On
the other hand, the few instances of briefly successful rebellions
did nothing but confirm the exclusion of slaves from the
community, for they left behind bands of outlaws who survived at
the boundaries of inhabited areas, more or less as feral animals
do in the modern world.

In antiquity
there was one way to leave the no man's land of the slave:
manumission. The term, which means literally to emit or release
from one's hand, vividly conveys the sense of giving up control
over something. It was, once again, the unilateral act of the
master. By giving up his dominion through an act that could be
religious or civil, formal or informal, the master sanctioned for
the slave the end of her or his condition as property and the
beginning of some form of recognition within the moral community.[4]
In republican Rome the change was even more radical: together with
freedom, the slave received citizenship, thus passing in one step
from the status of absolute outsider to that of full member of the
dominant group.

One objection
that has frequently been raised against the idea of animal
liberation is that animals cannot fight for themselves. They can
only be liberated by others. Yet in this respect too the parallel
with ancient slavery holds in practice, because slave rebellions
had so little effect on the institution as a whole. Moreover, just
as manumission was the only way out for slaves, so it appears to
be the kind of response needed for animals. Not only does it
address directly the question of status; it is also a
long-standing and well-known instrument for the bestowal of
freedom on those who cannot win it for themselves. When applied to
animals, moreover, manumission has a further advantage. Though it
cannot be used for all animals at once (for practical reasons, and
also because it is of its nature a reformist measure) it can still
create a precedent. As a tool for systematic intervention, each
use invites us to consider the possibility of applying the tool in
another situation.

Some problems
remain. Even when manumission was applied to large groups of
slaves, the freeing of each slave was, legally speaking, an
individual event. What is needed for animals seems instead to be a
distinct, more symbolic grant of freedom and moral status. Did
this ever occur in Greco-Roman antiquity? There is at least one
instance of this, although it concerns not chattel slavery, but a
different institution, sometimes referred to as 'collective
bondage'. Sparta's helots are the best-known example. Both the
origins and the details of the status of the helots are somewhat
obscure and still under discussion, but helots appear to have been
the class of producers on the exploitation of whom the highly
hierarchical Spartan society was based. The helots were employed
mainly in agriculture, and so normally lived apart from the ruling
group and were allowed to have a family and some sort of community
life. Their situation, however, wasn't much better than that of
chattel slaves. (It is enough to note that their subjection was
annually reaffirmed through ritual activities that differed from
modern sport hunting mainly in the fact that the prey was human.[5])

Because the
helots lived together, they were more dangerous to their masters,
and many helot rebellions shook Spartan society. In 369 BC,
however, during a war between the Spartans and the Thebans,
something exceptional happened: after defeating the Spartans at
Leuctra, Epaminondas, leader of the Theban forces, manumitted
en bloc the helots of Messenia. This act allowed the rebirth
of a whole people, with the ready return of its diaspora from all
over the Greek Mediterranean; it also had the effect of
transforming the ancient social structure on which Sparta had been
based. In the hands of the victorious Thebans, a collective
manumission had become a political instrument with momentous
consequences.

The impact
that the first nonhuman manumission could have would be much
greater. The same holds, however, for the difficulties that beset
it. To appreciate this, it is enough to recall that during the
2,300 years that have elapsed since Epaminondas' gesture, forms of
human bondage have persisted around the world, reaching their peak
in the slave societies of the New World, and coming to their
official end as recently as 1962, in the Arabian Peninsula.[6]
If it has taken so long to make a reality of the idea that no
member of our species can be an item of property, to bestow
freedom and equality on members of a species other than our own
will seem an arduous and improbable enterprise.

Granted, this
enterprise of expanding the moral community beyond the species
boundary has on its side the power of the rational challenge that,
starting with the Enlightenment, if not before, has provided the
theoretical basis for so many struggles for justice and has
undermined all the attempted justifications put up in defence of
the exclusion of some human beings from the moral community.
Indeed, the need to push the egalitarian stance beyond the
boundaries of the human species appears to be built into the
Enlightenment dream of a universal rationality. But this alone is
not enough to ensure the success of the enterprise. The history of
other social movements shows that we require a conscious strategy
to achieve what Darwin refers to as 'the gradual illumination of
men's minds'.[7]
For those who aim at change, it is vital to understand the
framework in which one has to act, and to take advantage of the
contradictions in the positions of one's opponents.

Why the
Great Apes?

A solid
barrier serves to keep nonhumans outside the protective moral
realm of our community. By virtue of this barrier, in the
influential words of Thomas Aquinas, 'it is not wrong for man to
use them, either by killing or in any other way whatever'.[8]
Does this barrier have a weak link on which we can concentrate our
efforts? Is there any grey area where the certainties of human
chauvinism begin to fade and an uneasy ambivalence makes recourse
to a collective animal manumission politically feasible? As the
philosophers, zoologists, ethologists, anthropologists, lawyers,
psychologists, educationalists and other scholars who have chosen
to support this project show, this grey area does exist. It is the
sphere that includes the branches closest to us in the
evolutionary tree. In the case of the other great apes, the
chimpanzee, the gorilla and the orang-utan, some of the notions
used to restrict equality and other moral privileges to human
beings instead of extending them to all sentient creatures can cut
the other way. When radical enfranchisement is being demanded for
our fellow apes, the very arguments usually offered to defend the
special moral status of human beings vis-a-vis nonhuman
animals - arguments based on biological bondedness or, more
significant still, on the possession of some specific
characteristics or abilities - can be turned against the status
quo.

Chimpanzees,
gorillas and orang-utans occupy a particular position from another
perspective, too. The appearance of apes who can communicate in a
human language marks a turning-point in human/animal
relationships. Granted, Washoe, Loulis, Koko, Michael, Chantek and
all their fellow great apes cannot directly demand their general
enfranchisement -although they can demand to be let out of their
cages, as Washoe once did[9]- but they can convey to us, in more detail than any
nonhuman animals have ever done before, a nonhuman viewpoint on
the world. This viewpoint can no longer be dismissed. Its bearers
have unwittingly become a vanguard, not only for their own kin,
but for all nonhuman animals.

Nevertheless,
it might be said that in focusing on beings as richly endowed as
the great apes we are setting too high a standard for admission to
the community of equals, and in so doing we could preclude, or
make more difficult, any further progress for animals whose
endowments are less like our own. No standard, however, can be
fixed forever. 'The notion of equality is a tool for rectifying
injustices ... As is often necessary for reform, it works on a
limited scale.'[10]Reformers can only start from a given situation, and work
from there; once they have made some gains, their next
starting-point will be a little further advanced, and when they
are strong enough they can bring pressure to bear from that point.

How can we
advocate inclusion or exclusion for whole species, when the whole
approach of animal liberationist ethics has been to deny the
validity of species boundaries, and to emphasise the overlap in
characteristics between members of our own species and members of
other species? Have we not always said that the boundary of
species is a morally irrelevant distinction, based on mere
biological data? Are we not in danger of reverting to a new form
of speciesism?

This is a
problem that has to do with boundaries, and boundaries are here
tied up with the collective feature of the proposed
manumission. What, then, can be said in favour of such a
collective manumission, apart from recognition of its obvious
symbolic value? We think that a direction can be found, once more,
in history. It is already clear that in classical antiquity, while
the collective emancipation of Messenian helots led to some
dramatic social changes, the random manumission of individual
human slaves never led to any noteworthy social progress. Even in
more recent times, when a conscious political design was not only
feasible, but was actually pursued - namely, during the first
stages of the anti-slavery struggle in nineteenth-century United
States – the freeing of individual slaves, or even the setting
free by an enlightened plantation owner of all the slaves on his
plantation, did little good for the anti-slavery side as a whole.
Given that the global admission of nonhuman animals to the
community of equals seems out of the question for the moment, one
way to avoid a parallel failure is to focus on the species as a
collectivity, and to opt for (otherwise questionable) rigid
boundaries.

Finally, we
cannot ignore doubts about the practical feasibility of the
project, and the concrete implications of admitting chimpanzees,
gorillas and orang-utans into the community of equals. Quite novel
problems are likely to arise, but they will not be insuperable,
and as we overcome each one, we will reveal the spurious nature of
the alleged obstacles to overcoming the boundaries between
species. In fact, difficulties also occurred in similar situations
involving humans, but this was no reason to abandon the overall
plan of emancipation. Readers will not need to be reminded that
the liberation of the American slaves after the Civil War was not
sufficient to achieve equal civil rights for them. Instead, a new
set of obstacles to equality arose, some of which were overcome
only by the civil rights movement of the 1960s, while others
remain a problem today.

For the idea
of providing a restitution of orang-utans, gorillas and
chimpanzees to their lands of origin, in particular, we can even
identify a precise historical antecedent: the creation in Africa
of the state of Liberia, which the American colonisation movement
dreamt would be a new homeland for those humans who had been
enslaved and transported across the ocean by other members of
their species. The fact that an independent nation called Liberia
still exists shows that the project was feasible, and if there
were things that went wrong, they were, significantly enough,
related to typically human questions, for example, the
discrimination against the native inhabitants of the area that the
immigrants soon practised.[11]

Certainly,
with regard to nonhumans, one can point to additional problems.
They will not be able to participate in the political structure of
the community. Unlike the descendants of the American slaves, they
will be unable to stand up in defence of their own rights, or of
any territory that they are granted, whether in Africa or in other
countries as well. How then is it going to be possible to ensure
for them the same protection afforded to full members of our
community? Here the analogy with the emancipation of slaves breaks
down; but to some extent we can draw on two further models,
depending on the kind of situation in which the liberated apes
will be. If they are living in natural conditions in their own
territories, whether in their homelands or in the countries to
which they have been coercively transported, they will have no
need of our assistance; they will need only to be left alone. We
do have world institutions — though imperfect ones — that exist in
order to protect weaker countries from stronger ones. We also have
considerable historical experience with the United Nations acting
as a protector of non-autonomous human regions, known as United
Nations Trust Territories. It is to an international body of this
kind that the defence of the first nonhuman independent
territories and a role in the regulation of mixed human and
nonhuman territories could be entrusted.

Where, on the
other hand, individuals have become so habituated to life within
our societies that it would not be in their own interests to be
returned to wild habitats, their status, and the protection to be
afforded them, could be just the same as that which we grant to
non-autonomous beings of our own species. As in the case of
children and the intellectually disabled, the basic protection
ensured by national laws could be supplemented by specially
appointed guardians. In fact, it is not only animals and
non-autonomous humans who are unable to stand up in defence of
their own rights; often normal adult humans have been in need of
protection. This is the raison d'etre of many international
organisations, such as the venerable Anti-Slavery Society for the
Protection of Human Rights or the Federation International des
Droits de L'Homme, created after the Dreyfus Affair, or the more
recently founded Amnesty International, an organisation that makes
the 'guardian' nature of its work clear by speaking of the
'adoption' of a political prisoner, when a local group takes up
that prisoner's cause. These nongovernmental organisations
oversee, within the constraints of their moral influence and any
political power or sanctions that they are able to wield, the
realisation of the various international declarations of human
rights in signatory nations. Their work is further evidence for
the necessity of creating the world institution that we have
envisaged. By combining some of the functions of existing models,
such a body could be in a position to carry on the complex task of
monitoring the implementation of a declaration of rights for the
great apes - wherever they may be.

The creation
of such an international body for the extension of the moral
community to all great apes will not be an easy task. If it can be
accomplished it will have an immediate practical value for
chimpanzees, gorillas and orang-utans all over the world. Perhaps
even more significant, however, will be its symbolic value as a
concrete representation of the first breach in the species
barrier.

[1]
See Giuseppe Cambiano, 'Aristotle and the anonymous opponents
of slavery', in Moses I. Finley (ed.), Classical Slavery
(Frank Cass, London, 1987); see also Robert Schlaifer,
'Greek theories of slavery from Homer to Aristotle', in Moses
I. Finley (ed.), Slavery in Classical Antiquity
(Heffer,
Cambridge, 1960), in particular pp. 199-201; and, for a
general survey of the voices of protest, Zvi Yavetz, Slaves
and Slavery in Ancient Rome (Transaction Books, New
Brunswick, NJ, 1988), pp. 115-18.

[6]
'Slavery in Saudi Arabia ended by Faisal edict',
New York Times,
7
November 1962. See also the answer of Saudi Arabia to the
first question of the UN Questionnaire on Slavery, in Mohamed
Awad, Rapport sur I'esclavage (United Nations, New
York, 1967), pp. 126-9.

[11]
On the differences in the way in which the 'Americo-Liberians'
and the indigenous inhabitants of Liberia were treated, see
F.J. Pedler, West Africa (Methuen, Birkenhead, 1959),
pp. 134-6; and C.S. Clapham, Liberia and Sierra Leone
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1976), pp. 8—9,17ff.